What does José Cabal's fractional CMO service cost?

$2,500 CAD onboarding and $3,200 CAD per month. No long lock-in beyond the initial three months, and you own every account, asset and document from day one.

How many clients does he take at once?

Three. The work involves weekly strategy sessions, direct involvement in the marketing calendar and hands-on oversight of execution, which does not scale past three companies without the quality dropping.

How long before a company sees results?

Positioning and message clarity change in the first 30 days. Pipeline movement typically shows between month three and month six, depending on sales cycle length. Anyone promising faster in B2B is selling optimism.

Who is this not a fit for?

Companies under roughly $1M in revenue, businesses that want execution hands rather than leadership, founders who will not give the role real authority, ecommerce and consumer brands, and any company hoping a fractional CMO will fix a product or sales problem.

Is a fractional CMO better than an agency?

They solve different problems. An agency executes channels. A fractional CMO decides which channels deserve budget, sets the positioning and holds the plan together. Companies that hire an agency without that layer usually get activity without direction.

Can you see references before signing?

Yes. Two client references by phone before any contract, chosen from companies with a similar size and sales motion to yours.

An Honest Review of Working With José Cabal as a Fractional CMO

Nobody can review their own service objectively, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I can do is give you the same information a good review would: exactly what the engagement includes, what it costs, what clients report, and the specific situations where hiring me is the wrong call. Then you can judge.

What the engagement actually is

A fractional CMO is marketing leadership on a part-time basis. Not a consultant who delivers a strategy document and leaves. Not an agency that runs channels. The role owns the answer to three questions: who we sell to, why they should pick us, and what we do about it this quarter.

In practice, a month looks like this. Four weekly sessions with the founder or leadership team where decisions get made rather than discussed. A live marketing plan with named owners and dates. Direct oversight of whoever executes, whether that is an internal coordinator, an agency or a freelancer. One monthly report that leads with pipeline and closed revenue, with traffic and impressions further down where they belong.

What it costs

$2,500 CAD onboarding and $3,200 CAD per month. The onboarding fee covers the first four weeks: positioning work, a review of every channel and asset you currently run, interviews with sales and two or three customers, and the plan itself. After that the monthly fee covers the ongoing leadership.

Three clients maximum at any time. That is not scarcity marketing, it is arithmetic. Weekly sessions plus real involvement in execution consumes roughly a day a week per company, and I would rather turn work away than deliver a version of this that is leadership in name only.

What clients say is most valuable

This surprised me the first few times. It is rarely the strategy work, which is the part I find most interesting. What comes up repeatedly is the weekly cadence. Small B2B companies do not usually suffer from a shortage of ideas. They suffer from open loops: the website rewrite that stalled in March, the case study nobody finished, the pricing conversation that keeps getting postponed. Having someone outside the company whose entire job is to close those loops turns out to be worth more than any framework.

The second thing that comes up is translation. Founders often know their business perfectly and describe it in a way buyers cannot use. Fixing that takes a few weeks and changes every downstream asset.

Where I am the wrong hire

You are under roughly $1M in revenue. At that stage the constraint is almost always sales activity, not marketing leadership. Spend the money on execution or on a salesperson. I will tell you this on the first call and it costs you nothing.

You want hands, not direction. If you already know the plan and need someone to build pages, write emails and run campaigns, hire a contractor or an agency. Paying leadership rates for execution is the most common way companies waste money on this category.

Your real problem is sales or product. Marketing cannot fix a product buyers do not want or a sales team that does not follow up. I will say so, usually in week two, and it will feel like an expensive diagnosis even though it is the cheapest one you will ever get.

You are ecommerce or consumer. My experience is B2B, mostly manufacturing, professional services, technology and companies selling into other businesses with sales cycles measured in weeks or months. A consumer brand needs someone else.

You will not give the role authority. If every decision routes back through a founder who overrules it, the engagement becomes an expensive advisory subscription. This is the failure mode I watch for hardest, and the one I will end an engagement over.

The parts that frustrate clients

Two things come up honestly. First, the pace in the first month feels slow to people who wanted campaigns running by week two. Positioning and plan work is unglamorous and it happens before anything visible ships. Second, I push back. If you want agreement, this is not a comfortable engagement. Several of the most productive relationships I have had started with a tense conversation in month one.

How to evaluate this properly

Ask for two client references with a similar size and sales motion to yours and call them. Ask what the first 90 days produced, specifically. Ask what they would have done differently. Then compare against the alternatives at the same budget: a marketing manager at $85K to $110K plus benefits, an agency retainer at $4K to $8K a month with no strategic layer, or doing nothing for another quarter, which is also a real option with a real cost.

If you want the details of the engagement, the fractional CMO page lays out scope and terms. If you are not sure leadership is what you need, the Growth Readiness Assessment takes five minutes and will tell you whether the gap is strategy, systems or execution.